Is Bush Wired?

The Rove That Dare Not Speak Its Plame

2005-10-11T01:45:00.000-07:00

Did the Cheney-Rove effort to discredit Joseph Wilson include dispatching a surrogate posing as a reporter, quondam male escort Jeff Gannon, to interview Wilson? And does the White House relationship with Gannon continue today?

I’ve pointed out before that Gannon's blog sounds very much as if it originates from the keyboard of Karl Rove. Rife with dated turns of phrase, political history arcana, and pats on the back for Rove, it's not always plausible as the voice of a man who never wrote a word or took part in politics until his late 40s.

The blog's preoccupations and elisions are also telling. Although it came into existence over Plamegate, it hasn't taken note of Rove's or Libby's fresh worries. Nor has it mentioned Judy Miller's release from jail, despite having called impatiently last summer for Miller to give testimony that the blog was somehow then sure would "clear" Rove. That was back when it looked as if it all might fall on Libby, if only Miller would talk.

But the blog's remarkably upbeat and confident on the Harriet Miers nomination. A recent post reads like a Rove speech, complete with his windy trademark omniscience and references to Sun-Tzu. Some excerpts:

"Like most conservatives, I have grown weary of how the Democrats continue to assert their relevance in governance when voters have removed them from power and reduced their numbers in three successive elections...When you peel away the top layer of beltway bloviation, the brilliant strategy becomes easier to see...If you view political strategy as war, as I am sure Karl Rove does, the Miers pick makes perfect sense....She will be confirmed, probably as easily as John G. Roberts…When conservatives stop to think about it, they will be comforted by what Bush has achieved. He will have delivered the Court he promised, without the political bloodshed everyone assumed would take place. A principle of Sun-Tzu is to have won the war before the first shot is fired."

At this point, Gannon (or Rove) is just about the only conservative blogger left standing who unreservedly admires Bush-Rove's "brilliance" in naming Harriet Miers to the court.

So, what does this all have to do with Valerie Plame's outing? Readers will recall that Gannon (nee James Guckert) did a long, three-part interview with former ambassador Joseph Wilson in October 2003 for Talon News, a fake news outlet set up by Texas GOP activist Bobby Eberle (a friend of Rove's and Grover Norquist's) to give Gannon press cover.

Gannon subsequently was questioned at least once, in early 2004, by FBI investigators who asked him about his references during the Wilson interview to a classified State Department memo that mentioned Plame in a paragraph marked "S" for secret. According to a New York Times story Friday, special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is now examining possible espionage law breaches in connection with the leaking of that memo.

Gannon may or may not have seen the memo; his answers about it have been contradictory, and the date of the interview hasn't been reported. But even assuming that his only knowledge of the memo was from an October 17, 2003 Wall Street Journal article that discussed it, how was it that Gannon first came to pursue the interview with Wilson?

Reporters and bloggers at Daily Kos, E Pluribus Media and BecomingGannon have suggested that Gannon was created as a GOP operative, originally to aid the Iraq propaganda effort. Gannon first appeared in the White House briefing room early in 2003, even before Talon News had been created. (Neither Talon News nor GOPUSA, the group that created it, was paying Gannon at the time, according to Talon's subsequent application for a Congressional press pass for Gannon.)

Gannon was useful in several ways. His puffball questions took up time that would have otherwise gone to serious questions, of course, and they also steered the agenda of discussion in directions the White House wanted.

He was on to the Wilson-Plame story early. On July 24, 2003, ten days after the Robert Novak column outing Plame was published, Gannon launched his own blog with a denunciation of the media for asking questions about the leak, which he said amounted to trying to make Bush into “George W. Nixon.”

By September, Gannon has said, he’d begun speaking with Wilson, though their interview did not take place until at least (internal date references suggest) mid-October. Well before that, at a White House press briefing on October 1, Gannon came to Scott McClellan’s aid with the question that Rove and other White House critics of Wilson had been pushing:

MR. McCLELLAN: You have a hypothetical? (Laughter.) I asked for a hypothetical. No, no. (Laughter.)

Q I'm no Bob Novak, but my feelings are really hurt that nobody leaked anything to me. (Laughter.) Has the White House asked George Tenet or anyone else at the CIA why they would send a partisan, like Ambassador Wilson, on this mission? And because he is so partisan--

MR. McCLELLAN: Has who asked? Has who asked anybody?

Q Has the White House asked George Tenet or anyone at the CIA why they would send a partisan like Ambassador Wilson on this mission? He's proven himself to be partisan, and does that cast doubt on the report that he filed in this matter?

MR. McCLELLAN: Yes, I think we've kind of been through this issue already. I don't know of any such conversations. Certainly, I don't think it's my position to get into speculating about someone's motives. I think that is a role for you in the media to determine how to follow.

Q Isn't the White House the least bit curious--

MR. McCLELLAN: And how to -- and how to present it to the public.

Q -- about how the process was, that Ambassador Wilson was chosen to go on this very important mission?

MR. McCLELLAN: I've seen the news coverage, just like you have. I've seen the issues that have been raised, and, again, I think that that's best left for you in the media to determine, not me from this podium.

So, with Gannon's assistance, McClellan was able to urge "you in the media" to investigate how Wilson was chosen for the mission to Niger.

Tex MacRae, in the BecomingGannon blog, lays out a possible sequence of events in which the classified memo was handed around town by Grover Norquist (at whose exclusive Wednesday gatherings Gannon was a frequent presence by early 2003, if not before). MacRae speculates that it was Norquist who told Gannon to interview Wilson in the hope of deriving information that could be used to discredit him.

My bet is that it was Rove who set Gannon in motion on the Wilson interview, whether directly or through Norquist. The published interview reads in part as an effort in scandal control: to find out exactly what Wilson knew about who was behind the leak, what he knew about Rove's involvement in particular, and to learn the names of journalists who had spoken to Wilson about the leak. At various points, Gannon asked Wilson:

-Regarding the revelation of your wife as a CIA operative, do you think Karl Rove was behind the leak?
-But the question again: Is Karl Rove the leaker?
-Any names attached to these journalists?
-So you don't blame Rove for the leak, you blame him for pushing the story and dragging your wife into the public square?

Of course by now Gannon and Rove, or whoever his overseer was, have had years to get their stories straight. But if there was a relationship with someone in the White House, and if it continues, there would be evidence in the form of phone records and email.

Gannon may be Plamegate's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, but he knows one thing: the identity of his handler (who may also, as I suspect, be his blogging partner). If Patrick Fitzgerald has asked about that, he also knows who initiated Gannon's interview with Joe Wilson, and likely who leaked the classified memo around Washington. But Gannon’s been mum on whether he’s ever appeared before the grand jury.

And back on the wire? See Bush's October 4th news conference starting at about 45:05.

Unbecoming Gannon: The Plame Memo

2005-07-24T15:44:00.000-07:00

Jeff Gannon's blog has mostly clammed up on the subject of Karl Rove since my post of a week ago.

I've been rereading earlier Gannon posts, though, and finding their language and range of political and historical references fascinating. How did James Dale Guckert, an auto body shop office manager and male escort in his mid-40s, who seems never to have written anything in all his life -- who was said never even to bring up politics in casual conversation -- arrive in Washington, and within a few months become an eloquent political writer/operative, channeling with exactitude Karl Rove's worldview, rhetoric, and interests (especially his desire to defeat Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle)? I suspect it began with a call from the White House to a 900 number, and a subsequent Pygmalion-like makeover of the unsophisticated fuckbuddy.

In May 2002, during a period when his occupation and address are otherwise a mystery, Guckert-Gannon floated his first nonsexual web site, "The Conservative Guy." It reads not at all like the calling card of an aspiring political writer. Rather, it's patently a direct-mail artist's astroturf creation --a Rove-smarmy appeal to swing voters:

"Welcome, fellow conservative!

"Who, me? A conservative?"

"Yes, YOU! You are a conservative and don't realize it. The label makes you uncomfortable. Conservatives are those mean guys you see on the TV news, right?

"For a long time the national media and Hollywood have portrayed conservatives as mean-spirited and narrow-minded. Conservatism has been so demonized that many people are reluctant to associate themselves with it. I felt that way for a while, wincing when I heard one news story after another about the "extreme conservatives". But I'm not a mean person, and the values I have are the same as those of conservatives. So how was I made to feel guilty about my values?

"Every day, more and more Americans are realizing that they have conservative core values. The September 11 attacks have awakened many of us to realities that have been obscured by those who promote a liberal agenda.

"I'm asking you to take an inventory of your political beliefs.

"CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE SURVEY!"

Later, "The Conservative Guy" describes himself, again in fluent direct-mail-ese:

"Who is The Conservative Guy anyhow?

"In many circles, I have become known as "the conservative guy". Some people don't remember my name because I am an average type guy. In the course of my life I have been a preppie, a yuppie, blue-collar, green-collar and white-collar. I've served in the military, graduated from college, taught in the public school system, was a truck driver, a management consultant, a union member, a fitness instructor and an entrepreneur. In short, I've been around. Kind of a "been there, done that" thing. I'm a two-holiday Christian and I usually vote Republican because they most often support conservative positions....

"...and what is he trying to do?

"I believe there are many men and women in America who are conservative. Many more than one would imagine. Many more than would think of themselves as conservatives. When I meet people, and the conversation turns to politics, as it always seems to with me, some of them sheepishly confess that they are Republicans or that they agree with the opinions I have just spoken..."

It's Gannon's role in the CIA agent outing investigation, however, where his useful-toolness to the White House reached its apotheosis. A poster to dailykos.com has a timeline of Gannon's embedding in "l'affaire Plame," making the case that the memo was given to Gannon in October 2003, after other reporters had proven unwilling to advance the White House spin, "to push the dual stories that a) Plame's name was already common knowledge and therefore `outing' her was not a crime and b) to continue to help discredit the CIA and Wilson."

The comprehensive BecomingGannon blog theorizes that Gannon may have received the classified intelligence report, or a description of it, from Grover Norquist, at whose Wednesday klatches Gannon was a regular. As BecomingGannon notes, Gannon himself has blogged that he began talking with Joseph Wilson in September 2003, though their actual interview took place in October.

Among his contradictory statements on the memo, Gannon has claimed on at least one occasion that he received the memo from a source outside the administration. It's worth quoting at length from his post from earlier this year (bolding is mine):

"A memo written by an INR (Intelligence and Research) analyst who made notes of the meeting at which Wilson was asked to go to Niger sensed that something fishy was going on. That report made it to the outside world courtesy of some patriotic whistleblower that realized that a bag job was underway. Novak's column 15 months later only confirmed what some already knew: Valerie Plame, a CIA employee had actively promoted him for the task.

"I believe Plame was exposed at this point far sooner than the timeline Wilson suggests. The classified document that slipped out sometime after the meeting put her name before the public, albeit a small group of inside-the-beltway types, but effectively ended the notion that she was still covert.

"Despite his deception, I was pleased with the interview until I read a front page article in the Washington Post on December 26, 2003 that said the CIA was angry that an INR report was circulating, mentioning Talon News as having written about it. The source said that the document was false and that whoever wrote it could not have possibly been at any such meeting.The Senate Intelligence Committee also blew that nugget of disinformation out of the water. The INR report was right on target. What is difficult to understand is the reason that the CIA would want to discredit this report.

"The first clue came when the agents from the FBI came to my home in March 2003 [sic; he means 2004] to question me in connection to the leak probe. I was flattered to think that I was important enough to be included among the luminaries like Andrea Mitchell, Tim Russert and Chris Matthews who were also named in a Justice Department subpoena of records from the White House. But most of the questions were about the INR report. They wanted to know where I got it and what I knew about it. Of course, as a journalist there wasn't much I could say without revealing my sources. I'm sure they were not satisfied, but it made me wonder why they were so interested in a document the CIA said was false."

Rove's Other Dummy

2005-07-17T00:05:00.000-07:00

Fake journalist Jeff Gannon's blog in the last few months reads as if it were ghosted by Karl Rove himself. And as Fitzgerald's federal grand jury looms larger, the retooled Gannon blog has become increasingly preoccupied with one thing: defending Rove—particularly in connection with the Plame affair.

Here are some excerpts from Gannon's upgraded column. They ring as the voice of a furiously competitive political operative, one who's been spinning for a long time, and who's very fond of Karl Rove:

"...it will be Democrats trying to free themselves from the web of wild accusations made against Rove, now that we know he did nothing wrong."

"...is clearly a political ploy to take down the key architect of successive Democratic electoral defeats."

"...a nonsensical editorial today urging Karl Rove to hold a press conference and tell everything he knows. But he already has - to the Grand Jury investigating the alleged leak."

"What is exceedingly clear is that Karl Rove was not trying to punish Joe Wilson by exposing his wife. What is also clear is that you cannot tell most White House reporters ANYTHING in confidence. After this is over, I predict journalists will have far less access to the officials of this White House."

"...the feeding frenzy to take down Karl Rove."

"...it's more than likely this could be the outcome of this episode. Rove survives and the Democrats and their Old Media handpuppets fall flat on their as**s."

"...if Miller were to talk it would take the focus off Rove..."

"It's time for the New York Times and Judy Miller to stop obstructing justice and tell what they know..."

"White House press corps convicts Rove..."

"Newsday reported that Rep. Peter King said, 'Karl Rove deserves a medal.'"

"...Rove is right."

"Bias exposed by Rove v. Durbin..."

"I'm inclined to believe that Fitzpatrick will simply close up shop, with or without the information from Matt Cooper and Judith Miller, because there is no case."

"Rove 'friend' sees him as threat to First Amendment."

"Some friend."

"Some friend" indeed. Even cast out of the White House press briefing room, in short, Gannon to all appearances is Rove's dummy, saying to the world what Rove can't say directly. That's always been Rove's M.O., to have things suddenly "being said" that no one can pin on Rove himself. It seems likely that's why "Jeff Gannon" was created in the first place—to speak for Rove at White House press briefings. And that's why Gannon's blog now hilariously complains of the loss of "privacy" the Internet has wrought—as if he hadn't posted naked pictures of himself on his own prostitution web site. What it means is that he and his White House handler don't like losing the shadows in which they're accustomed to conducting their dirty ops.

Gannon has denied that he was working in behalf of anyone at the White House. I don't believe him. His questions at White House press briefings went beyond the softball. They weren't even questions so much as mini-speeches. Take, for example, this statement from Gannon at a February 10, 2004 press briefing, during which McClellan had been asked many questions about gaps in Bush's Texas National Guard service records. Gannon switched the subject, and gave a short indictment of John Kerry.

"Q: Since there have been so many questions about what the President was doing over 30 years ago, what is it that he did after his honorable discharge from the National Guard? Did he make speeches alongside [actress and anti-Vietnam War activist] Jane Fonda, denouncing America's racist war in Vietnam? Did he testify before Congress that American troops committed war crimes in Vietnam? And did he throw somebody else's medals at the White House to protest a war America was still fighting? What was he doing after he was honorably discharged?"

At another briefing, on April 1, 2004, Jeff Gannon again switched the subject, not even framing his speech as a question:

"Q: I'd like to comment on the angry mob that surrounded Karl Rove's house on Sunday. They chanted and pounded on the windows until the D.C. police and Secret Service were called in. The protest was organized by the National People's Action Coalition, whose members receive taxpayer funds, as well as financial support from groups including Theresa Heinz Kerry's Tides Foundation."

Was Gannon explicitly part of the administration's "fake news" front? How was he paid, and by whom? When "Talon News" applied in the spring of 2003 for Congressional press credentials for Gannon, it admitted that Gannon was currently a "volunteer" reporter who was not paid. Talon promised to begin providing more than half of Gannon's income in order to meet the credentialing requirements, but the application was turned down.

As Dottie Lynch of CBSNews.com wrote in February, when Gannon was passing as a White House reporter, he lent his phony news persona to Rove's political business: helping the right unseat Tom Daschle, the leading Democrat in Congress. This South Dakota campaign was probably Rove's electoral priority #2, right after re-electing Shrub.

"Padraig Pearse," a poster to dailykos.com, links to the Nashua Advocate to note that GOPUSA, the organization that ginned up Talon "News" expressly to get Gannon into the White House, has the earmarks of a Rove front. He writes:

"That GOPUSA and TALON news were not just some simple little advocacy group seems highlighted by their role in the South Dakota campaign.... my hypothesis is that under the able scrutiny of Karl Rove, members of Texas's closety gay underground were brought in to similarly create a dirty tricks arm of the campaign. Most members of GOPUSA probably had no no idea that any of this was happening. That was desirable. The secret leveraged world of gays and espionage neatly overlap. Indeed, gays and networks of gays have long been a staple in the clandestine world for those very reasons."

As poster Pearse suggests, there's a type of gay rightwinger who, far from resenting the closet, relishes the secrecy and power over others that his double life bestows. Such Walter Mitty-esque gays are attracted to fascism and, of course, to swaggering military men. They feel superior to the unsophisticated rubes who couldn't begin to imagine their secret world. They maintain wives and families, and would never risk public affectional love relationships with the men they have sex with.

Before the former Karmak office manager, beer distributor employee, and man of the night "hot military stud" Jeff Gannon was admitted to the White House press corps, he graduated from a two-day broadcast journalism "school" operated by the Morton C. Blackwell Institute wing of nuttery of which Rove is also a patron.

Recall that nothing important happens in the White House that Rove hasn't approved or, more likely, ordered.

At the White House, where Gannon arrived in late 2002 or early 2003, he seemed to have insider connections. According to rawstory.com, Gannon told a news producer for a major network's local affiliate that the U.S. was about to attack Iraq four hours before Bush's speech announced it. Gannon reportedly also had early word that the president would be making the speech to the nation. Rawstory.com reported that the producer said that Gannon also had surprisingly early and accurate scoops for other big stories, such as the CBS faked National Guard documents imbroglio.

A most curious note in the saga of Gannon, who was active in his college alumni association under his real name, James Dale ("JD") Guckert, is a line in the group's August 2003 newsletter explaining Guckert's absence from the chapter's July 17th meeting: "Jody Yozviak was absent but sent a report and JD Guckert was busy entertaining the Prime Minister of Great Britain (not a joke). "

Not a joke?! It certainly sounds like a very odd joke. Gannon/Guckert filed a short item on the Bush-Blair meeting for "Talon" that day, and a longer one the following day.

In the Plame affair, Gannon has boasted on his blog that he was the first to report on how former ambassador Joseph Wilson, the husband of then-covert CIA agent Valerie (nee Plame) Wilson was chosen for the fact-finding trip to Niger. He was also among the journalists reportedly subpoenaed by the federal grand jury in 2004; whether or not he was actually called by the jury is in doubt, although he has said he was interviewed by two FBI agents at his home.

The federal investigators' interest in Gannon seems to have been sparked by his reference to a classified memo, whose accuracy the CIA has disputed, in his October 2003 interview with Joseph Wilson. Gannon asked Wilson: "An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?'"

Tom Maguire of JustOneMinute points out that an October 17 Wall Street Journal story described the memo in words almost identical to those used by Gannon, suggesting that Gannon may have based his question on the newspaper story alone. But as any journalist knows, you may have a primary source in one hand but still find it easier to frame a question from a well-written summary.

Joseph Wilson has put the time of the interview as not more than a week before Gannon published it on October 28, 2003. Another key to the date is Wilson's reference during the interview to a Rotary Club speech he gave "last week." An Epluribus Media report on Daily Kos links to the club newsletter dating the speech on October 8. [Correction: A better key to the date derives from Gannon's mention during the interview of a Nicholas Kristof New York Timescolumn mentioning Aldrich Ames, which was published October 11, 2003.)

Gannon's responses as to whether or not he received the memo have been contradictory, as the Epluribus Media report by Philip Curtis lays out. In an undated post on his blog, Gannon said of his FBI interrogation, "most of the questions were about the INR report. They wanted to know where I got it and what I knew about it. Of course, as a journalist there wasn't much I could say without revealing my sources."

In a "Talon News" item quoted by mediamatters.org, Gannon said the memo did not come from "inside the administration." "I don't know why I'm on the list of journalists being called before the Grand Jury," Gannon said in "Talon" on March 9, 2004. "I have been an outspoken critic of the leak probe and an aggressive questioner of the motives behind it. That seems to have drawn the attention of someone with the authority to issue subpoenas." But in February this year, as Maquire's blog notes, he told Editor and Publisher that he'd neither been subpoenaed or testified before the jury. He refused to tell E&P if had ever seen the memo.

So, to recap: the Rove-run White House for two years gave unusual access, including possible overnight visits (Secret Service logs show days when he never signed out) to a not-very-former male prostitute operating under a fake name who had no journalism experience, and who at least through mid-April 2003, was still on offer by the hour as a "discrete" [SIC] top with an eight-inch "weapon."

Here's what I think: The upper ranks of the Bush administration include several extremely powerful, deeply closeted gays. Did Bush know about Rove's ringer in the White House press corps? He did seem uneasy when he called on Gannon in February. To his credit, as Kitty Kelley's book on the Bush family details, Bush has had close, longstanding friendships and work associations with gay men. They include former Rove aide Israel Hernandez, Bush's "body" man when he was governer (and who briefly lived with the Bushes then), whom Bush recently named an assistant secretary of Commerce. Republican Party chairman Ken Mehlman, another of Rove's former aides, refuses to answer questions about being gay.

Now gay Republicans are, of course, entitled to their privacy and to their political opinions, including the opposition of some to same-sex marriage. But haven't politically powerful gays who take advantage of the closet to force others back into it given up any right to expect others to cover for them? Surely those who are working to extinguish the rights of other gays to lead open lives of love and commitment have no claim on the sanctuary of the closet.

I think Gannon is Rove's tool, and that Gannon did his bidding in the Plame affair, too. Justin Raimundo, who has done some of the best reporting on Gannon, wrote last winter: "If we follow the slime trail left by Gannon and his sponsors all the way to the end, we'll stand face-to-face with the real authors of the Iraq war, and the full record of their crimes in the reckless pursuit of power and imperial glory. Gannon may be a minor player in all this, but then so was the Watergate burglary a minor escapade..."

Postscript:
Here are two of Rove's dreamy accounts of his first sight of his future master in 1973, when Bush Sr. asked him to pick up the wastrel son at Washington's Union Station the day before Thanskgiving.

"He showed up and was wearing his flight jacket from the National Guard and Levis and cowboy boots, and exhibited more charisma than any one individual should have."

"Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma—you know, wow."

Another Postscript:
I haven't seen this quotation from Scott McClellan reproduced anywhere recently. In the fall of 2003, he said that some people inquiring about Rove's connection to the Plame affair were "sensationalizing the issue." McClellan said:

"The leaking of classified information is a very serious allegation, and the president has made it very clear that he wants to get to the bottom of this. Unfortunately, there are some who are looking through the lens of political opportunism. There are some who are seeking partisan political advantage."

CORRECTION: The original version of this post argued for a conclusion based on my early ignorance that Gannon had posted veiled suggestions on his blog that he met or knew a member of Congess years ago. I first read such a post as evidence that Rove must have literally ghosted the remark.

The Disassemblers

2005-06-03T14:12:00.000-07:00

Here's a link, from crooksandliars.com, to a moment in Bush's 4/28/05 news conference. His eyes cast down, the president pauses in the middle of a sentence, mutters, "in a minute," then resumes his answer. It's stunning. Watch it on the higher resolution version if you can, the wmv. file.

Nobody in the press mentioned it. (See 6/13 postscript below***) As the Gannon episode showed, the White House reporters-who-do-not-report are skilled at averting their eyes and turning off their brains. It may seem like a strange skill set for journalists, but it enables them to avoid stories that might trip up their careers.

Okay, I understand that half the MSM has left the journalism business and set up as a wing of government public affairs. But what about real journalists, people like David Corn? Why did they give Bush a pass on the wire, too?

I met a reporter recently, a fan of this site, who told me of pressing Seymour Hersh about the box. Hersh said that an audio prompter would never be proven. He'd asked, and his sources knew nothing about it. As the reporter quoted Hersh, "If there's something there, I'd find it out. If there's something that isn't there--I'd find that out, too."

Gotta love Sy Hersh. But I think he gave up too soon. Sometimes only three or four people know about a wrongdoing, and they'll never tell. Smoking guns and documents don't exist for every story. But that doesn't mean those stories can't be pursued from another angle, even if one amasses only circumstantial evidence. As Thoreau said, "some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." I think the president talking to his shoes qualifies.

I wish Hersh and his editors at The New Yorker would hire linguists and experts in the coordination of speech and eye movements to analyze the president's speech in the debates and at news conferences. Or put Malcolm Gladwell on to it. Or hire Dave Lindorff, an undersung hero of journalism for his reporting on this story and many others.

David Corn, for his part, dismissed the audio prompter story out of hand, and strenuously discouraged a writer acquaintance of mine from pursuing it in early October, after this blog first published. There was no story there, Bush did not use an earpiece, it was blogger hysteria, and that was that. Corn never did write about it except in passing reference to a "conspiracy theory," when he blogged in December about a notion then making the rounds that the bulge was a wearable defibrillator:

"...seeing is (almost) believing. And there sure looks like a bulge in several photographs of Bush. The LifeVest explanation seems more reasonable than that offered by the Bush White House: a lousy tailor. I'm not sold on this theory. But I would not discourage further exploration."

Right. I've admired David Corn's work, but those shifty lines give me serious pause. Would he really rather protect his amour-propre than report on this honestly?

To itemize Corn's inaccuracies: 1) He implies the Bush White House offered a single, perhaps "reasonable" "explanation" for the bulge, rather than a series of obvious falsehoods that had to be successively discarded, beginning with its suggestion that the images were faked, and ending with an uncomfortable Bush delivering a rehearsed joking denial in answer to a serious question from Good Morning America's Charlie Gibson. 2) Corn implies the video (not photographic) images are ambiguous and do not unmistakably show a bulge with the outlines of a box and wire. 3) His headline tags the subject as being in the realm of "conspiracy" thinking. Tell me again why that would be? 4) Corn says he won't "discourage" the (risible) defibrillator notion, but doesn't mention that he discouraged investigation into another, stronger theory--which he omits here even to cite, as if it's been conclusively dismissed (unlike his respectful mention of the White House's "explanation.")

KELLER KARL

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller reportedly commented publicly for the first time a few months ago about the pre-election spiking of the Times story on the box. Dave Lindorff's blog, thiscantbehappening.net, reports that Keller told a group of Columbia students that the major story, by the Times's William Broad, Andrew Revkin and John Schwarz, who had interviewed a NASA imaging analyst among others (see our previous posts on this), "didn't hold up."

A story by Nicholas Lemann inThe New Yorker tells of Keller and Rove meeting for drinks on October 22, and Rove seizing the occasion to complain bitterly about the Times's supposed anti-Bush bias. As Keller recalled it in an email message to Lemann, Rove "fired off complaints like a Gatling gun, some specific, some generic, some about specific writers, some about specific elements of specific stories.” A few days later, according to Lindorff's comprehensive report on fair.org, the Times decided to hold the Bush bulge story. They killed it on October 27th, the day before it was set to run.

Lemann's story, "Why is everyone mad at the mainstream media?" somehow missed this striking incident. A story that Keller reportedly said he thought could affect the outcome of the presidential election was spiked five days after the Happy Hour gone wrong. It would seem that some mainstream-media "haters" have more sway than others.

I don't believe that Rove would have been so clumsy as to urge Keller to quash the story. It seems more likely that he would hint that the box was a security device that he could say no more about, but that the Times would be making an error of faked-National-Guard-document proportions if it published even expert speculation that Bush had used a prompter.

Or maybe nothing at all was said between the two men about the jokes and questions and Doonesbury strips that had made the bulge the most widely-referred-to nonstory of the year. Of course, at that point, the Times's story on the bulge was still a go. And Rove and other Bush officials had been frantically trying to discredit it with references to "grassy knolls" and "little green men." So, maybe Rove did have something to say on the subject.

Either way, I think that Keller and the Times still owe readers an explanation of why its one real report on such a serious subject wasn't worth printing. Keller wrote something recently about the Times needing to take on its critics directly, and to be more transparent. Here's an invitation to do just that, Mr. Keller. Did Karl Rove talk to you about the Bush box story on October 22, or tell you something to persuade you that the story didn't hold up? And if so, won't you please share that information with your readers?

***
POSTSCRIPT:

The official transcripts of the 4/28/05 news conference by CQ Transcripts and the White House record the muttered words as “kind of." I've watched and listened to the clip many times, and he's not saying, "kind of."

I don't know if CQ makes its transcriptions entirely independently or against an early White House transcript (or vice versa). This is not the first time, however, that these official transcripts have airbrushed one of Bush's verbal missteps. I was watching with only half an eye the Dec.15, 2003 news conference, when Bush responded strangely to a Gannonesque question about whether Democratic criticism amounted to "hate speech." At first Bush seemed to draw a blank. "There's time for politics," he said uncertainly. "There's time for politics, and I--" "It's an absurd asinuation," he suddenly popped out, with an air of surprise at his own words. That was the moment it hit me that Bush was using a prompter.

Both the White House and CQ transcripts of that news conference rendered Bush's neologism as "insinuation." So, I'm curious just how CQ's transcription process works. I'll ask the company to explain it for the edification of stupefied (that means made stupid) Bush-watchers everywhere.

Meanwhile, here’s the relevant 4/28/05 passage from the White House and CQ transcripts with the correct "in a minute" reinserted in the place of "kind of."

Q Mr. President, it was four years ago when you first met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. You said you looked into his eyes and you saw his soul. You'll also be meeting with the Russian leader in about a week or so. What do you think of Putin now that he has expressed a willingness to supply weapons to outlaw regimes, specifically his recent comments that he said he would provide short-range missiles to Syria and nuclear components to Iran?

THE PRESIDENT: We have -- first, just in a broader – in a minute -- in a broader sense, I had a long talk with Vladimir there in Slovakia about democracy and about the importance of democracy. And as you remember, at the press conference -- or if you weren't there, somebody will remember -- he stood up and said he strongly supports democracy. I take him for his word.

I -- and we'll continue to work. Condi just -- Condi Rice, our Secretary of State, just came back and she briefed me that she had a very good discussion with Vladimir about the merits of democracy, about the need to listen to the people and have a government that's responsive.

Black Box Presidency

2004-11-07T23:16:00.000-08:00

The Hill quotes an unnamed Secret Service source as saying that the box-shaped bulge under Bush's jacket at the debates was a strap for a bulletproof vest, a secret the Secret Service didn't want to reveal during the campaign, when the president was exposed to potential assassins out on the campaign trail.

Oddly, though, the president never seemed to have his bulgy protective strap on when he spoke at huge campaign rallies in his shirtsleeves -- though he's donned it for assassin-free zones, such as the East Room of the White House. Perhaps the Secret Service was speaking figuratively. It seems unlikely, though, that the Secret Service would ask that Bush lie about the device on television, as he did when he told ABC's Charles Gibson that he was "embarrassed" to say that it was just a wrinkle in his shirt.

The New York Times reports in tomorrow's paper (Nov 8) that the Secret Service won't comment on the question. The Times story doesn't point out that The Hill's attempt at Bush-buffing doesn't even make sense: Presidential body armor is hardly a secret, and how exactly would keeping it quiet help deflect attempts on the president's life? Wouldn't it have the reverse effect? Not to mention that people who know what bulletproof vests look like, i.e. actual soldiers, say there's no body armor in the world with that Rube Goldberg configuration.

I apologize for repeating myself, but what's a blogger to do when respectable journalists at the Times are more intent on writing entertainingly than on providing readers with all the relevant facts?

So, here we are, a month and two days after we first broached the question of Bush's wire (Oct 5). Nothing has changed except that a few more people know about the fraud. But most major news media seem to prefer that the people be protected from this knowledge. They wish they didn't know it themselves. Soviet-style, newspapers around the country ran Doonesbury's strips on the Bush prompter without investigating their premise. How did they expect their readers to know what the strips were about, and whether or not they amounted to fair criticism or dishonest slurs?

More details on the failure to report the story by two major papers: According to Dave Lindorff, the Washington Post's Bob Woodward advised the NASA scientist who analyzed the video images of Bush's box to take the story to Salon, since he wouldn't be able to get it past his own editors before Nov. 2. And the New York Times killed a story scheduled for October 28 by reporters William Broad and John Schwarz because, Lindorff says, the Times feared that printing the news might influence the election. Of course, failing to inform the public also influenced the election, as the voters pathetically quoted in the Times as having chosen Bush because they felt he was "honest," demonstrate.

Certainly the hosts at NBC's "Democracy Plaza" (sadly, no more) whose hosts cited approvingly the ordeal of Ohioans waiting in line for hours to vote, weren't about to bring up questions about the president's honesty. That wouldn't fit with the cheery Disney script of democracy, any more than would a mention of leaky Diebold electronic voting machines, which reportedly use a code a ten-year-old could hack. Not to mention the voting irregularities, including incidents in several battleground states where Kerry voters found touchscreen machines repeatedly registering their votes for Bush.

Vote fraud is the sinister explanation, of course, for why raw exit polls wrongly omened a Kerry win nationally and in many states. The men who conducted the NEP polls for the networks and AP have explained the variance as likely due to greater eagerness by Kerry voters to talk to pollsters. Which makes sense -- except that it can't explain why Bush's large vote gains over the exit poll numbers occurred mainly in battleground states. Wouldn't Kerry voters be just as responsive -- and Bush voters just as reticent -- in Arizona or Connecticut? [Update Nov. 12: A U Penn professor's analysis places the odds at 250 million to one that the anomalous exit polls in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania were due to chance alone.]

In Venezuela's and other foreign elections, exit polls are seen as a check on possible fraud. Here that possibility was discarded a priori, perhaps because of Karl Rove's reputation for honest dealing. Steve Coll of the Washington Post suggested in an online chat that it seemed likelier that all the exit polls were wrong than that a large conspiracy hacked the election. But who said it would take a large conspiracy? Experts have warned for years that anyone with a home computer and inexpensive software could break into electronic voting tabulators. It may already have happened in one state. Read this shocking, carefully-reported piece in the UK Guardian. Using machines that are modem-equipped and that create no paper trail is like leaving a open bag of cash on a subway bench. It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to say that someone will make off with it sooner or later.

I await the explanations of experts like mysterypollster.com, who can parse these contradictory exit polls further -- and I'll correct what I've written here accordingly. But for more on how to have an election whose results we can unreservedly trust the next time around, check out openvotingconsortium.org, demos-usa.org, verifiedvoting.org, and blackboxvoting.org.

That's if for IsBushWired. Barring developments, our story is done. We'll leave the page up for latecomers interested in knowing the full story. And feel free to write: isbushwired@gmail.com

The Dark Side of the Moon

2004-10-28T21:55:00.000-07:00

A NASA senior research physicist, who's an international authority on planetary topographical image analysis, has been spending his nights analyzing the topography of Bush's back in the first debate. He tells Salon the obvious, that a wrinkle couldn't possibly have produced the bulge. What he can't explain, I suppose, is why the rest of the press, with the honorable exception of CNN's Paula Zahn, is abdicating its ethical responsibility to report this story, leaving it to Salon and to bloggers. It makes me feel sick for my profession. Anyway, look at the pictures the analyst sharpened for the clearest view yet of all the president's wires.

Update 10/31: I feel even sicker after reading Dave Lindorff's comprehensive update at MotherJones.com reporting, among other things, how the NASA scientist, Robert M. Nelson, was rebuffed when he offered his analysis to major newspapers (The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post). Nelson has now analyzed Bush's ever-evolving back bulge from all three debates, and tells MotherJones.com, "In the first debate the bulges create the impression of a letter T with a small feature which appears similar to a wire under the jacket running upward from the right. In the second and third debates the jacket has a generally padded shape across a large part of the entire back which tapers inward toward the spine in a downward direction. This is consistent with the hypothesis that a pad was inserted to conceal the T-shaped device seen in the first debate."

Bush Speaks: The Empire Has No Clothes

2004-10-26T13:29:00.000-07:00

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality." -- senior Bush advisor quoted by Ron Suskind in The New York Times Magazine.

Finally, someone asked the president about the object on his back during Debate 1. And Bush lied straight-faced. This is from Dan Froomkin's account at washingtonpost.com of Charles Gibson's Good Morning America interview with Bush aired today:

"Brandishing a copy of the photo, he asked: "Final question. What the hell was that on your back, in the first debate?"

Bush chuckled.

Bush: "Well, you know, Karen Hughes and Dan Bartlett have rigged up a sound system -- "

Gibson: "You're getting in trouble -- "

Bush: "I don't know what that is. I mean, it is, uh, it is, it's a -- I'm embarrassed to say it's a poorly tailored shirt."

Gibson: "It was the shirt?"

Bush: "Yeah, absolutely."

Gibson: "There was no sound system, there was no electrical signal? There was --"

Bush: "How does an electrical -- please explain to me how it works so maybe if I were ever to debate again I could figure it out. I guess the assumption was that if I was straying off course they would, kind of like a hunting dog, they would punch a buzzer and I would jerk back into place. I -- it's just absurd.""

Charles Gibson and ABC deserve credit for asking the president, but failed abjectly at following up on his brazen lies. The object under the president's jacket is obviously solid. There isn't any bad tailoring, at any price in the "reality-based" world, that could create a shirt with a convex rectangular bulge, much less one that would jut through a jacket.

Not to mention that he would have had to have worn the same shirt to all three debates. (Presidential tailor Georges de Paris must have threatened to file suit now, rather than to make any more, so the White House has fallen back on blaming the shirt.)

IsBushWired also hears that ABC News has interviewed several White House staff members who've confirmed that Bush uses a low-frequency transceiver during meetings with foreign dignitaries. Hope that ABC plans to run its story in time for voters to consider this information.

Postscript: We've since watched the interview and are struck by how quickly the president responded with a rehearsed joke. Clearly Rove et al talked to him about how to reply. The truth evidently wasn't an option. But as the Good Morning America interview ended, the camera drew back, and Laura Bush had disappeared from her spot on the couch next to the president. Someone in the White House is still capable of shame.

CBS Bloodied, Bowed

Meanwhile, CBSNews.com has groveled to the White House by printing a nonbylined story composed by AP's surely all-time-dumbest, or most slavish, reporter. The story's accompanied by a post-debate shot of the president that seems to show no bulge. We need not remind readers that photos, unlike the single video feed which everyone shared, can be touched up. But in any case, Bush's cheatpiece was most clearly outlined when he hunched over the podium, stretching the back of his jacket over the device and the cord snaking up his right shoulder.

Refresh your memory of the protuberance by looking again at the jpegs reproduced below in our archived post, "What's the Frequency, Karl?" These are stills that we took unaltered from the Fox pool video feed. Or check out cryptome.org's 28 time-stamped screen captures from the video.

Oh, and BushBulge.com has found
another photograph of a bulge-bearing Bush on the White House web site, lighting a menorah last December. Enjoy it before it's scrubbed.

Media Otitis

2004-10-18T03:44:00.000-07:00

Jon Stewart for president! Mr. Smith Goes on Crossfire!
Man, did Jon Stewart stick it last week to beta-hack Paul Begala and his mean little top in the bowtie. It's really something to encounter moral and political seriousness on television (outside of The Simpsons or Stewart's own show, I mean.) Watch it here.

But back to our story, the self-abasing media figures on their knees before Bush-Rove. Every weekday on Crossfire, Paul Begala claims to be "Paul Begala, from the left." So, naturally -- you'll follow the logic -- he leapt at the chance last week (after complimenting Bush magnanimously as "a great guy...not a very good president, but actually a very good person") to blast into space a question about what exactly it was Bush was hiding under the back of his jacket during the debates. And on what basis did he explode it? It came from the left.

Here's the transcript:

QUESTION: My question is, what do you think the hump on G.W.'s back during the debate was?

STEWART: Say it again?

QUESTION: What do you think the hump on George's back during the debate was?

STEWART: The hump on his back?

BEGALA: Oh, you're familiar? This is (INAUDIBLE) conspiracy theory. Can I take this one?

STEWART: Yes, please.

BEGALA: It was nothing, his suit was puckering. A lot of people believe he had one of these in his ear. If he was being fed lines by Karl Rove, he would not have been so inarticulate, guys. It's a myth.

(LAUGHTER)

BEGALA: It's not true. There's this huge myth out on the left.

AUDIENCE IN UNISON: Thank you, Paul-from-the-left, for speaking truth to us about your own crazy people!

Okay, I heard the last quote only on my own headset, but otherwise it's as transcribed. I don't think that Paul Begala set out consciously to serve up untruths to the CNN audience. But his strange zeal to erase the question a priori and ad hominem (ad leftum) must have also rendered him psychologically unwilling to actually look at the video tape. Because anyone who looks at the Fox pool feed, especially of the first debate, will see that there is a box-shaped object under the back of the president's jacket. And a cord, too, both of them way bigger and solider than a pucker on even the worst suit.

And anyone who follows the news will know that the White House first claimed the images were faked, and then, contradictorily, that there was nothing at all under the jacket, and then that it was a rumple caused by a master tailor. And at last, the White House began stonewalling with japes that have the courtiers all in stitches.

So, who are the real conspiracy theorists here, the fantasists and true believers? And who are the real journalists? Those who ask the questions, or those who refuse, as an article of faith, even to look? As a public service, I offer this short refresher course:

How to Reason, a Primer for Hacks of All Ages

Syllogism 1:
"If Bush were cheating with a prompter, he wouldn't have done so badly, especially in the first debate. Therefore, he couldn't have been getting prompted."

This reasoning is so obviously flawed that I can almost feel Terry McAuliffe's amazement that others have seized on it as being anything other than a polite way to say that Bush may be a cheat, but at least he's an inept one.

By the logic of S.1, one might say that any Olympian who comes in at the bottom of his event could not possibly have doped. In short, it's no logic at all.

Because, of course, you can flub at cheating, as at anything. And sometimes it can actually be harder to fake it than just to wing it.

Moreover, while it's said to be easy to give a natural-enough sounding speech using an audio prompter, it must be far more difficult to produce quick, natural-sounding responses in an unscripted give-and-take. And the voice in Bush's ear wasn't any more used to an actual debate than Bush was; the White House hasn't had to face critical arguments in years.

So, scratch S.1. Here's Syllogism 2:

"Bush and Rove have long made cheating and deception for advantage their first resort. If Bush thought he could get away with it, he would cheat rather than try to prepare for the debate. And in fact, he did not prepare for the debate, his advisors said.

Case closed.

Finally, here's the other misuse of rhetoric and reason employed by fake journalists who care little about the truth of this or any question: Rather than confront reality or ask questions, to do their jobs, in short, they use meaningless labels intended to slur the source: "bloggers" "internet conspiracy theorists." In the inversion of reality that we've come to expect in public life these days (except for life savers like Jon Stewart!) these fake journalists are themselves conspiracy theorists and fantasists: in the face of all evidence and experience, they cling to the fiction that the White House tells the truth.

Well, this story does not give IsBushWired a spooky thrill. There's nothing mysterious or sophisticated about Bush's earpiece prompter: It's as simple as cheating at cards or golf or stuffing the ballot box, just plain old scummy behavior that ought to get a guy kicked out of Skull and Bones if not the White House.

Email tips and comments to IsBushWired@gmail.com. All messages will be treated as confidential.

In Your Ear

A writer who said he's a Secret Service agent posted anonymously to IsBushWired after the second debate last week, saying that, "In the case of his first and second debates, campaign advisors were providing rebuttal information to President Bush as Senator Kerry was answering questions...Just because President Bush used this communicator receiver to provide voters with more appropriate rebuttal answers to questions posed does not warrant negative comment. "

It's a truly astonishing post. There's no way to verify it, but it sure has an authentic ring, right down to the way the writer refers to the presidents he's served, and the blandly bureaucratic rationalizing of cheating. Here's the message in full:

As a Secret Service Agent, I can tell you that President is always wired with a communicator receiver to enable him to acquire detailed information in advance of situations that may arise. In the case of his first and second debates, campaign advisors were providing rebuttal information to President Bush as Senator Kerry was answering questions. This is not uncommon for an incumbant president. Having worked for President G.H.W. Bush, President W.C., and now President G.W. Bush, I am at all times aware that the president is wired, primarily to inform him of hostile crowds that he may encounter. Just because President Bush used this communicator receiver to provide voters with more appropriate rebuttal answers to questions posed does not warrant negative comment from this or any other website. The President has more on his mind than worrying about inconsequential people and whether his answers questions honestly, using his own thoughts, or the thoughts of campaign advisors and/or political analysts."

And here's a post to the site from another writer who also claims to know something about the matter:

"As a D.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and a communications specialist, I fully understand what has been said about the President being wired. In 1998, a small communications receiver was developed for the RNC to allow candidates to be cued on answers to provide for certain types of questioning. This receiver does not interfere with the communications equipment worn by Secret Service personnel and operates on a completely different frequency. With an adapter attached to the receiver, worn either on a shoulder harness or waist belt, a single Secret Service Agent, using a split frequency transmitter, a warn the receiver's wearer of any approaching danger. In the case of the President, it enhances his protection. He does not hear multiple voices or the chatter of numerous people. Using a satellite uplink on the transmitter--primarily for long distance communications--political analysts and advisors could easily provide verbal instructions to the President during a question/answer/rebutal session, without any interference from an outside communications source. The corporation for whom I am employed, has developed numerous "special" communications devices for our government. The particular unit mentioned by the above listed Secret Service Agent is one of the devices we have manufactured. Anyone with $150,000 can purchase the transmitter base, satelite uplink adapter and receiver. However, they cannot purchase the unit with the same frequency used by the President."

Bush Campaign Manager to Press, Voters: Eat our S*&# & Smile

2004-10-17T15:58:00.000-07:00

From NBC News, Meet the Press, October 17:

MR. RUSSERT: Before we go, Mr. Mehlman, clear up this mystery that has been raging on the Internet. This was the first debate, George Bush at the podium, the bulge in the back of the suit. All right. Come clean. What is it?

MR. MEHLMAN: The president, in fact, was receiving secret signals from aliens in outer space. You heard it here on MEET THE PRESS.

MR. SHRUM: You mean you sent Rove into orbit.

MR. RUSSERT: It was not a bulletproof vest or magnets for his back or anything?

MR. MEHLMAN: I'm not sure what it was, but the gentleman responsible for the tailoring of that suit is no longer working for this administration.

MR. SHRUM: Well, wait a minute. Now, the president only wears Oxford clothes. I'll bet that tailor is still there.

MR. RUSSERT: May we all be smiling this way on November 2.

Postscript: And this is not the first time that Meet the Press has been confronted with the issue. Last February, the show covered for the president when a radiofreeusa.net editor emailed a query asking if Bush had been prompted in his Oval Office interview with Russert. Executive producer Betsy Fischer responded to the inquiry with an email that said the president wore no earpiece "at any time" in the show. She didn't explain how Meet the Press had established this, or whether MTP asked the White House about it before or after the interview.

Get off our backs (and the president's), press big shots tell fellow reporter

2004-10-16T15:31:00.000-07:00

The national press seems almost as eager as the White House to have this story die away -- perhaps because it makes them look almost as bad as the White House.

Reporter Dan Elias was at the third debate, where he asked every official and network newsman that he saw for an explanation. Elias says he felt he had to ask because, "there's incontrovertibly a foreign object on the president's back. We need to get an answer as to what it is."

He writes, "As we all know, at one point in our history, the national media conspired to protect a president's image by hiding his handicap: the fact that FDR had been crippled by polio and used a wheelchair. It's hard to believe that that's what's happening today. But the reticence of the national media to seriously engage this issue is having the same effect. And it may well be denying a very important truth to the American public at a critical time in our history. And if we're all off-base about this, the White House can easily set us straight. Why are they choosing not to do so?

Here are more excerpts from his email to IsBushWired:

"Like many readers of this web site, I've been mystified as to why this story hasn't been picked up in full force by the network media, nor raised as a serious issue by the Kerry campaign, nor put to rest by the White House.

On Wednesday night, I had the opportunity to do a little direct research, and put people on the record on this issue.

I attended the debate at ASU in Tempe. During the pre-debate hours, I encountered, in the press tent, various members of the national press, and the most prominent figures of the two campaigns, and asked each the following question: "What was the president wearing on his back during the first debate, and doesn't the public deserve an explanation as to what it was?" My questioning, when possible, took place in the presence of other members of the media. Below you'll see a list of the individuals I asked and how they responded.

Ken Mehlman, Bush campaign manager:
"The president is an alien. You heard it here first. The president is an alien. Seriously, I didn't see it, I didn't pay attention to it, I was amused to hear that someone thought it was a transmitter." Me: "Well, who knows what it is? "Mehlman: "I do not know. I will try to find out and tell you." (Note: Salon also posted on Melhman's and another top Republican's non-answers.)

Joe Lockhart, senior adviser to the Kerry campaign: "I don't know what it was, if it was a transmitter it's nothing we can prove, so we're staying away from it."

Jeff Greenfield, CNN senior commentator: "I don't want to go there. That's 'Area 51' kind of stuff. Did you see Bush's performance? If he was getting help, a Democrat must have been on the other end."

Alan Colmes, FOX News: "I haven't seen the photo." Me: It's not a photo, Mr. Colmes, it's apparent on any video of the debate. Colmes: "Well, I haven't seen it." After more questioning, Mr. Colmes grew impatient and said, "What do you want me to say?" I suggested it was irresponsible of him not to have looked into the story and formed an opinion on it.

Chris Wallace, FOX News: "I don't know." Me: "Well, no one knows, but don't we deserve an explanation?" Wallace: "Would you leave me alone and let me do my job?" Me (as Wallace walked away to the FOX set): "That is your job, Mr. Wallace."

Elias concludes his letter to us, "Regardless of whether it's a receiver or not, a foreign object of some kind is clearly visible on the president's back during the first debate. The public has a right to know what it is. The White House could put the entire issue to rest by telling us. Their failure to do so suggests there is no legitimate explanation."

Bush Speech Confounds Portland

Portland's Willamette Weekly reports (October 6) that when Bush spoke at a local high school in August, "the notoriously syntax-challenged prez astonished national and local reporters on the scene with 90 minutes of eloquence--causing widespread speculation that Bush was wired. "We were going, 'Wow, he didn't even make one flaw,'" says one Portland reporter who was on the scene.'"

The Last Puppet Show

2004-10-15T03:25:00.000-07:00

Following yesterday's expert ID of the presidential cheatpiece, today Salon has an interview with a countersurveillance specialist (who worked for several presidential cabinets, reportedly including the elder Bush's) who says, "I have personally sat outside the White House with lab-grade testing equipment -- and have cataloged, monitored and confirmed that wireless monitors are being used." Vanessa Kerry seems to take a hard post-debate look at the president's still-bulgy back. Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman responds to persistent questions about the box-bulge with degrading whimsy: "The president is an alien. That's your quote of the day. He has been getting information from Mars."

A Washington Post writer worries that the White House's failure to explain the bulge "risks perpetuating an image of Bush as a puppet." Isn't the presidential image something for the White House to worry about? Reporters should worry about whether the president really is a puppet.

Salon also notes Drudge's mysteriously total silence on the topic.

Did anyone else notice that John Kerry began delivering some answers directly into the camera about halfway through? Soon thereafter, oddly enough, W started looking into the camera, too! Not very successfully, because his eyes kept drifting off to the side. But where'd he get the idea?

Although the technology stories may provide real proof, I think linguistic and videographic analyses will also give it away. One reason this story has gained widespread credence already is because it's more like a sense perception than it is a "theory." It's something you notice with a start -- a moment where you see the listening look as Bush gets a phrase or reminder and tries to recite it before he forgets. At these times his speech lacks whole-body involvement, and seems to be just coming out of his mouth. (Maybe that's why he had a hard time looking in the camera.) Over the three debates, people saw Bush seemingly listening at times as he was speaking, and even heard him overriding his own speech when a better thought apparently occurred to the voice in his ear. IsBushWired once read that people can recognize in a glance where another person's eyes are tracking, even from a distance of a hundred feet. In the same way, we can take in in one look the meaning of distant-looking eyes, unnaturally placed pauses, stalling for time, and implausible bursts of facts, figures and pompously mispronounced phrases (cf. "an absurd asinuation") from a man who's known never to read.

W Stands for Wired?

2004-10-13T15:33:00.000-07:00

I know appeals to patriotism are doomed to be roundly mocked in our cynical times, but if any good soul in the White House or elsewhere in the country knows about or has evidence of the president's earwig -- please do your country a favor and blow the whistle now, before the next Bush-Cheney production knocks us all for a loop. Email us at isbushwired@gmail.com. We'll keep your identity confidential until and if you decide to go public.

An article by John Blossom has its finger on what IsBushWired is about, minus the part about "monetizing." We hope the major news media are finally onto the story, too, and will report back to the people in enough time that they can cast their votes undeceived. The mainstream press's willed blindness to this story for four years amounts to unspoken collusion with the White House to deceive the people. It's shocking.

Who you gonna believe, Bush spokesmen or your lying eyes?

A Salon update (Oct 13) quotes a technical expert whose company makes audio transceivers for the U.S. military and private companies. Looking at photos of the bulge, expert Alex Darbut says, "There's no question about it. It's a pretty obvious one -- larger than most because it probably has descrambling capability."

Bush-Cheney officials continue to deny there was anything at all under Bush's jacket, and say it was just a wrinkle.

(The Salon story also reproduces a photo of Bush driving at his ranch that some think shows a similar "bulge." To me -- and more to the point, to this doctor posting on democraticunderground.com -- it just looks like his right shoulder blade.)

Down to the Wire:
Just saw this very funny column about tailoring and wires in the New York Daily News ("Bush's Back is Front & Center"). Would that this were the first, or even the last question to be asked tonight. Funny how the networks were so responsive to those wacky Swift Boat accusations, but haven't even mentioned John Edwards ' newsworthy joke on Leno last night that Kerry might want to pat Bush down before tonight's debate.

TV on the Radio

2004-10-13T15:30:00.000-07:00

A posting from a reader who says he spoke recently with an audio engineer for a major media outlet:"He said he was on site setting up for one of the debates. At these on sites they are required to scan the area for RF interference. He said his specrum analyzer picked up several RF bands that were not in the Secret Service saftey frequencies. He said, upon him asking questions of his supervisors about these frequencies, he was approached by 'officials' telling him to 'go blind immedeately' and to forget what he saw and to keep his eyes and ears out of those bands.
All of those RFs are encoded, including the ones used by the networks. He indicated that there may be people, engineers, thatr may hve 'accidentally' left their SAs on and maybe recorded some of the stuff. Now this is *highly* illegal (thank you FCC) but there may be proof out there.."

The above is beyond us, technically and legally, but we're putting it up for what it's worth. Another reader suggested that an infrared/thermographic camera might reveal the device the president is wearing. Doubtful that would be permitted, however, as wouldn't it show his Underoos, too? IsBushWired urges all electronic sleuths to avoid using any technology for tonight's debate that's not entirely legal, harmless and peaceful. Ignorance of the law is no excuse, so if you're not sure, consult a very good lawyer first, or ask your local ACLU. Another resource is the Electronic Freedom Frontier (www.eff.org).

Over and out! Later, debaters!

**********************************************

Calling on the AFP

A simple way for major news media, you with all your millions in resources, to check out the "prompter vs. repeater" theory:

Chirac is said by people who saw it on TV to react visibly to the second voice speaking Bush's lines -- whether it was a repeater for generating closed-captions or a prompter -- in the June press briefing at the Elysee Palace. This is from a posting on Portland Indymedia:

"His buddy, Chirac somehow had a mic on Bush AND whoever it is that speaks to him. You could hear "rove"? say a sentence then Bush repeat it exactly the same way...word for word. He just continued on thru it, but when it was over, he acted very paranoid looking all around. Like he was wondering what was to come next. Cherac
had a VERY HUGE smile, winked and nodded as they left. It was a beautiful sight!"

Many reporters and officials in the audience that day should be able to tell us: Did the voice that was heard precede Bush's in real time? If so, he was using a prompter. If it followed Bush's voice (again in real time, at the event) then it was likely that of a live-human-being hired to repeat speech into a text-generating engine for closed captioning.

It is odd, as readers have pointed out, that this unsynced audio phenomenon doesn't seem to happen with other officials and live news events, only with some of Bush's speeches. In addition to the Chirac-Bush event, television viewers in some places heard a voice speaking Bush's lines before he did during his 9/11 address. The new Salon story says there are also reports of a prompter-like voice heard at Bush's remarks at the Sea Island G-8 summit meeting in June as well. But it doesn't say if that voice was heard in real-time by the audience, or on a broadcast.

The Emperor's New Suit

2004-10-12T20:13:00.000-07:00

Tailor to presidents Georges de Paris falls on his needle, says the box-bulge is just a pucker along the jacket's back seam. Wow. I've never seen a suit, or any garment, with a back like this -- except maybe that lumpy dress I once made in home economics, with the darts inside out.

Note to the White House press claque: Enough with the “internet conspiracy buffs” BS, hacks! This is something called a story. Remember those? Off your knees!

New: An earpiece in Bush made him an instant whiz kid on Indonesian politics, speculates State Department contract interpreter Fred Burks, who first interpreted for Bush at a September 19, 2001 meeting with Indonesian president Megawati Soekarnoputri. In a letter published on democrats.com and reprinted at this website, (and confirmed in a telephone conversation with IsBushWired) he says Bush displayed an astonishing grasp of obscure details of Indonesian politics during a 90-minute meeting. "I concluded either that Bush was much more intelligent than we had been led to believe, or that somehow someone was feeding answers to him through a hidden earpiece...Having worked directly with President Bush twice since then, and having additionally talked with many of my fellow interpreters who have worked directly with him, I am now certain that he could not have had that much knowledge of Indonesia. He doesn't even read the daily newspaper to keep up with what's being reported in the press. I am convinced that he must have been using some sort of earpiece through which someone was telling him what to say."

Odd Goings-on in Tennessee

Somebody claiming to be "Brad Menfil" of Knoxville, TN, recently posted on Portland's Indymedia site that he was told by a Bush campaign worker named Scott Zale that Bush is known among many campaign workers to be wired. Here's the text of the post, followed by a rebuttal that raises more questions than it answers:

"I have contacts within the Republican Party. I was told by Scott Zale, a Repulican operative in eastern Tennessee that he knows it to be a fact that Bush was wired. He said that within the Bush campaign, there are certain mid-level staffers that have leaked this tidbit because it was just "too fantastic to ignore."

Zale told me that the transmission device is popular with other high profile officials in the Bush administration. It helps everybody stay "on message." Zale said that Bush was only fed ready responses to just certain types of questions. He didn't know which questions those were but admitted that Bush just sounded(to him)to be more articulate at certain "oportune" times.

Zale confided that he was told that the president wore a loose fitting jacket during both debates. The device protuded because Bush has a tendency to hunch over and shrug his shoulders a lot.

This is a true story as it was told to me. If you want to know more, please contact Scott Zale at the Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters in Knoxville, Tn. Thanks."

IsBushWired called Bush-Cheney in Knoxville and confirmed that a Scott Zale was known there, though the woman who answered the phone said, "he's hardly ever here. He has a day job."

Meanwhile,somebody posting as "Scott Zale" repliedon the portlandindymedia site, under the headline "Scott Zale speaks for himself":

Please shut down this blog. I was informed this morning by the national editor of the Knoxville Times that my name was invoked by a man named "Brad Menfil" in regards to this out-of-control story.

It is true that I work for Bush-Cheney here in Tennessee. My office is in Gatlinburg, not Knoxville. Although I do happen to work at least two days a week in Knoxville. I am a staff accountant and one of my duties is to process local contributions. As part of that duty, I have to wire funds to the national committee in Washington D.C. So I do have national Republican contacts and have heard many things.

"Brad" is not his real name but I suspect he is or may be my counterpart in the Washington collections office. He has probably been to Tennessee about 15 times in the last 7 weeks, though he does not live here. I won't give his real name (even though he felt it was necessary to give mine).

The Knoxville Times called me at 6am this morning asking me to confirm or deny the "Bush is Wired" story they read here at Portland IMC. My immediate response was, "What is the Portland IMC?" and I then I issued a "no comment". Other than that, I did say that "Brad Menfil" is not a real person.

Please stop speculating about this. Our president is a great man and can only get hurt by this. I suspect this isn't going to go away and I regret anything that I said to "Brad" that may contribute to downfall of a great man and president.

Please drop this for the good of our country. We have bigger problems and should not be distracted by matters that don't ultimately determine the measure of an honest man. I want to say that the right answers are what matter most, not whether or not those answers were "fed" my someone else. President Bush is a good messenger regardless.

Thanks, Scott Zale, Senior Staff Accountant, Bush-Cheney Tennessee.

The person writing as "Brad Menfil" then posted back to Portland Indymedia:
"Scott Zale is right, "Brad Menfil" is not my real name and I didn't hear this story from him, he heard it from me. Sorry Scott.
I do work for Bush-Cheney and I can olny say that the substance of my first posting is correct, even though I used a fake name. I hope everybody understands why I would do this. I got a call from Scott this morning (actually, about 10 minutes ago). He said that he had been contacted by ABC and Fox after his own posting. I don't share his belief that ignoring this would be good for the country. I'm sorry I involved Scott and didn't have enough courage to use my real name. I hope the truth gets out and Scott is absolved.
Thanks for reading this, "Brad Menfil."

IsBushWired looked at the Knoxville Times online. It didn't look at all like a real newspaper, as Glenn Ward, editor of The South Knoxville and Seymour Times Sentinel confirmed. "I've never heard of it," he said. Looking at the website, he agreed that it seemed to be a lot of clippings taken off news wires. So, who called Mr. Zale at 6 in the morning? Or did anybody call Scott Zale at all? Scott Zale seems to exist, but who can be sure? Maybe somebody else used his name to write to Portland Indymedia.

Update: Webmeisters, thanks for your work in digging up the provenance of the Knoxville Times site; many of you reported that it was created 8/19/2003 in Australia by a John Mcevoy, who owns a company Mainstream Capital EC, headquartered in Manama, Bahrain, with offices in Sydney, Australia. A PRWeb July press release announced it was launching a new search engine called 100.com.

Curiously, when I first looked at the Knoxville Times site Monday afternoon, there was no masthead, no information about ownership, not even an email address or the word "Tennessee" in the title. Following my posting about the "fake" newspaper Monday afternoon, the site added a box explaining, "The Knoxville Times is essentially a local Knoxville newspaper, but with a national and international perspective....The biggest advantage we have is that we are an online newspaper, which means we are constantly refreshing our stories as more and more information comes to hand."

The lead story, however, about environmentalist protestors at a local coal company exective's home in West Knoxville Sunday night, is not a story at all, but a link to a posting about the action by the protestors at an anarchist website, www.infoshop.org.

The "newspaper" box goes on: "We like to think if you're looking for breaking news out of Knoxville, Tennessee, the United States, or the world, you'll look for it first at the Knoxville Times."

Hmmm. I don't think so. It's a genuinely weird front for something or other. Who is John McEvoy, anyway, and who's the editor?

The Zale letter also reads in part like an official Bush-Cheney production, whereas "Brad Menfil's" second letter sounds faintly genuine -- if there's a real person in any of this. But I wouldn't bet on it. It could all be fiction cooked up by Karl Rove and Co. We won't waste any more time on it unless a credible source gets in touch with us with a great deal of information that checks out.

Incidentally, legit editor Glenn Ward said his own newspaper, which can be Googled (though they don't have a web site yet) has been reporting lately on the recent shutdown -- for no obvious reason, he said -- by the FCC with "heavy FBI involvement" of a tiny, 100-watt unlicensed radio station in the area that had been reporting critically on local matters, including the federal TVA project. )

Earwig and the Angry Bush

2004-10-09T20:55:00.000-07:00

Some writers say Bush seemed "wired" last night! AP has a photo showing a rounded hump between Bush’s shoulder blades. Other posters saw a boxy lump at his abdomen that made the right side of his suit hang funny. He reached into his jacket in that area a couple of times as if to adjust something.

Another poster notes the Reuters photo on NPR’s home page, of Bush’s right ear (into which Kerry is whispering congratulations to Rove.) The poster thought it looked as if something is in there. Could the person who used NASA imaging technology to sharpen the other photo (NOT the ones we used -- we took only the straight stuff off the Fox video feed) take a look at this and report back? Maybe it's just some gum he was saving for later.

Cryptome.org has an interesting analysis of Debate 1's box-shaped bulge, 28 time-stamped video images of it, and a link to the kind of device used for remote prompting.

As to the times in which viewers heard a voice other than the president's speaking his words, i.e. on the night of 9/11 and during the Bush-Chirac press conference: there may be an innocent explanation for the two voices. A poster explains it may be a voice used for live subtitling, in which a "re-speaker" repeats what is being said into a voice recognition engine in order to generate text.

"I think the Bush - Chirac clip is pretty simple to explain. Many networks run a text-service for their live programming, where they use a speech-recognition engine and a re-speaker to dictate to that engine what is said by whoever speaks in the program. The text is then fed to be overlaid the "live" programming in progress. Live here means delayed so that the timing of the text is more or less matched with what is going on on-screen. The re-speaker needs to be a second or two ahead of the
"live" feed for the recognition engine to be able to generate the text. What I think you hear here is the voice of the re-speaker that has for some reason been overlaid the "live" voice-feed."

That sounds like the simplest explanation, unless it emerges that those actually in the room at Bush-Chirac heard the voice speaking before Bush, in which case they heard a prompter. Viewers on television said that Chirac reacted visibly to the voice, but he may have been reacting to the seeming echo.

A Faith-Based Debate

A reader comments: "The accusation is ridiculous. It is a slanderous false accusation from the pit! In the debate, he demonstrated no hesitation in his comments or rebuttals. I know who the President is wired to: The Almighty, Jehovah God is His Lord." Yours sincerely, Mr. Crackpot, Tulsa, OK

Dear Mr. Crackpot:
We are all wired to the HP, an evangelist might reply, but sometimes we hang up on Her/Him, and call instead on Karl, Karen, etc, to tell us what to say. In the debates, that would be called cheating.

What Are You Wearing Tonight?

2004-10-08T19:15:00.000-07:00

A former Special Forces officer of my acquaintance who served in Iraq during the first Gulf War says that the photos of Bush's back are not body armor. Bush often appears in shirtsleeves at public rallies with no visible bulges. Think about it: If you were George Bush, what would you fear more, going into a debate with John Kerry without body armor -- or without your prompter? Take a look at this device.

Postscript to the Debate: Oh, whatever was there for the first debate has been moved to a more secure location. But the coverup is not persuasive: The New York Times reports (Oct 9) that the White House first said that the pictures of the bulge might have been "doctored." When that didn't fly, campaign communications director Nicolle Devinish told the Times that the bulge was "most likely a rumpling...or a wrinkle in the fabric." White House and campaign officials also told the newspaper that Bush was not wearing a bulletproof jacket in the first debate, that there was nothing under his jacket, and that he wore no receiver.

What's the frequency, Karl?

2004-10-05T01:46:00.000-07:00

This site is a clearinghouse for discussion of whether President Bush uses an earpiece through which he's fed lines and cues by offstage advisers. His speech rhythms suggest this, as do some of his word choices and interjections, and his constantly shifting eye movements while speaking. And there's another form of evidence: Television viewers have sometimes heard another voice speaking Bush's words before he says them. When Bush spoke at D-Day ceremonies in France last June, for example, viewers watching on CNN, Fox and MSNBC, including mediachannel.org's Danny Schechter, were startled to hear another voice speaking Bush's words as if to prompt him. [POST SCRIPT, SUNDAY 10/10: As discussed above, this may have been due to the use of a live voice "repeater" accidentally broadcast over a slightly delayed "live" broadcast. We'll take off this part of the discussion until we determine that is otherwise.]

Reporters should have looked into this long ago. But for the past four years through Bush's first debate last week with John Kerry -- and even in the days after the debate -- the press has ignored the evidence of its eyes and ears, and failed to ask whether the president secretly relies on unseen handlers for some public events, including press conferences. If Bush wore a hidden earpiece to cheat in this way during his first debate with John Kerry (however unsuccessfully), it is urgent that the fraud be exposed before the election.

The agreement set by the debate commission barred shots of the candidates from the rear of the stage -- a provision reportedly demanded by RNC negotiator James Baker. (It also specified only hardwired podium microphones for the first debate, i.e. no lapel mics.) The networks refused to comply with the camera angle rules, broadcasting occasional shots of the candidates from behind. The images here are from the Fox video pool feed.

Many viewers thus saw a squarish bulge the size of a large battery pack under the back of Bush's suit jacket, with an S-shaped cord appearing to snake up the right side of his back. Several blogs have carried speculation that it was an audio receiver.

A poster to NYCIndymedia says, "Think 'passive transducer' earpiece." He writes, "The bulges under his jacket are likely receiver/repeaters that pick up the transmitter (and encrypted?) signals from his handlers and transmit them, at very low power, to the earpiece."

"Sure, Bush uses an earpiece sometimes," a top Washington editor for Reuters said to me last spring. "State of the Union -- he had an earpiece for that. Everybody knows it," he said, or assumes it. But everybody doesn't know it, I said. Why hadn't Reuters investigated? The editor shrugged and said it wasn't so different from using a teleprompter.

Except that a teleprompter isn't a secret. And Americans have the right to know if the president can't or won't speak in public without covert assistance.

Television hosts and news anchors wear earpieces, called IFBs (for internal [or interruptible] foldback, or feedback) which fit in the ear canal and are almost invisibly small, to receive cues from their producers. (Language scientists say that "shadowing," repeating the words someone else is speaking, is not at all difficult, but it is difficult not to move your eyes when listening.) Television journalists would be likely to spot the use of an IFB or at least to suspect it. So, why haven't they raised the question? I suspect it's untouchable in part because asking the question now points up all the years they let go by without asking it.

But these are the questions that must be asked now, by the Commission on Presidential Debates, and journalists: Does the president use an earpiece in his meetings with the public and with journalists? Did he wear one in last week's debate? How can members of the public who suspect he wore an earpiece be assured that he will not do so in the next debate? What was the object underneath his jacket?

--Ed.

Email tips and information to isbushwired@gmail.com
Postscript, Friday a.m: Salon just posted a story in which the debate commission confirms the candidates were not equipped with wireless mics, and that it doesn't know what the object on Bush's back was.

To read "The Voice in Bush's Ear," the earliest-dated post on this site, go to archives and scroll to the post at the bottom.

MORE LINKS:
Many links to photos and articles at bushwired.blogspot.com

A documentary maker explains why he thinks Bush is wired for sound.Discussion of audio "shadowing" here. A news photograph from July 7 shows Bush with another odd bulge at the back of his jacket. The suspicions of Veritas were aroused by a moment in Bush's December 2003 news conference. Here is an excerpt from his post :

Q I know you said there will be a time for politics. But you've also said you wanted to change the tone in Washington. Howard Dean recently seemed to muse aloud whether you had advance knowledge of 9/11. Do you agree or disagree with the RNC that this kind of rhetoric borders on political hate speech?

THE PRESIDENT: There's time for politics. There's time for politics, and I -- it's an absurd insinuation.

- White House Press Conference, Dec. 15

A funny thing happened at the December 15th presidential press conference. Asked to comment on an earlier statement by Howard Dean regarding his alleged foreknowledge of 9/11, Bush stumbles about the stage, clearly caught off guard by the question, then delivers the line: "It's an absurd asinuation."

...it could not be more clear that Bush was provided the words with which to answer. At first, Bush stumbles about, repeating his previous line that "there's a time for politics." During this time, he's avoiding eye contact, shrugging, and delaying. Then, the answer is given to him, presumably through a wireless ear piece. Bush then suddenly delivers his line that "it's an absurd asinuation." The suddenness of his reply, after having been speechless, the smile in his eyes when he's given the correct answer, and his incorrect pronunciation of the word "insinuation" all lead to [the] conclusion that he was prompted to provide this answer.

More images below: The first is an AFP photo taken in July at a press event at a Michigan airport, where Bush spoke about six judicial nominees.. The debate images are from the Fox video pool feed.

About This Blog

IsBushWired was created by a journalist with twenty+ years of experience in print, radio and television. It originated during the first debate, when I noticed a boxy shape under the president's jacket. As a viewer, I had previously suspected Bush of being coached via an earpiece in interviews and news conferences, because his language rhythms, strange pauses, and sudden access to facts or phrases were like nothing I'd ever seen. That was far from my mind when I watched the first debate, however. Although I've written or worked for some of the best news outlets in the country (and never had to retract or apologize for a story, either) I've chosen to remain anonymous here in order to keep the focus on the story rather than on the messenger, and to hold at bay Rove's squads and Freepers, who like nothing more than to personalize issues that they can't defend based on the facts.
--Editor